‘Venom’ Almost Had a Much Different Opening Sequence

This post contains SPOILERS for Venom, so you’re not allowed to bite our heads off when we spoil the opening scene for you.

Venom opens in space, but it almost spent much more time there. The Sony film begins with a space craft from Riz Ahmed’s Life Foundation returning to Earth. There’s a bunch of alien symbiotes on board, all safely tucked away inside canisters. But then something goes wrong, the ship crashes, and one of the piles of black extraterrestrial goo escapes while the rest are safely shipped to San Francisco.

In a new interview with CinemaBlend, director Ruben Fleischer revealed that the film almost had a much different opening, taking us first to Venom’s home planet of Klyntar. We would’ve seen a buncha alien symbiotes crawling around the planet, probably yelling about how hungry they are. Fleischer described the original opening sequence and his decision to axe it:

The beginning of the movie was a hard one. Like, how much do we want to tell the backstory? There was a version [of the opening] where there was a planet crawling with tons of symbiotes that were collected and taken back to Earth by the Life Foundation. They had encountered them. But it kind of felt like, my instinct was it would be better to keep it more mysterious and just know that they’ve retrieved something from space. We don’t know exactly by what means or how. Jenny [Slate]‘s character later says they encountered it on a comet that was passing, and they retrieved these samples and brought it back to Earth. But yeah, I thought it was better just leave it a little bit mysterious, the backstory of the aliens.

That original opening wasn’t just a passing thought either; Fleischer even had concept art drawn up for it. Producer Matt Tolmach shared a little bit more with the site about the initial plans for going to Klyntar:

We toyed with some art work that we loved. … We toyed with it. But we wanted the movie – it’s out there. It’s part of our mythology. It’s part of our backstory, Klyntar and where this all came from and who knows what’s next. But, it made sense to, in this movie, to let the origin of those things kind of unravel in the storytelling is as opposed to going [to that planet].

I get the whole idea of letting the mystery be, and we really don’t need to see Venom’s home after all, do we? If only Fleischer would’ve spent a little less time considering Klyntar and a little more trying to make sense of the many things that uh, make zero sense in the movie. Although, maybe a trip to Klyntar would’ve explained a few things that left us puzzled, like why Venom is obsessed with tater tots. Maybe Klyntar has a fast food chain known for the crispy potato treats. Now, we’ll never know.